Scientists are warning politicians immersed in climate change policy not to forget that the world is also in the midst of a plastic waste crisis.
They fear that so much energy is being expended on emissions policy that tackling plastic pollution will be sidelined.
A paper from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and Bangor University says plastic pollution and climate change are not separate.
It says the issues are actually intertwined – and each makes the other worse.
Manufacturing plastic items adds to greenhouse gas emissions, while extreme weather such as floods and typhoons associated with a heating planet will disperse and worsen plastic pollution in the sea.
The researchers highlight that marine species and ecosystems, such as coral reefs, are taking a double hit from both problems.
Reefs and other vulnerable habitats are also suffering from the seas heating, from ocean acidification, pollution from farms and industry, dredging, development, tourism and over-fishing.
And in addition, sea ice is a major trap for microplastics, which will be released into the ocean as the ice melts due to warming.
The researchers want politicians to address all these issues – and not to allow climate change to take all the policy “bandwidth”.
Professor Heather Koldewey from ZSL said: “Climate change is undoubtedly one of the most critical global threats of our time. Plastic pollution is also having a global impact; from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest parts of our ocean.
“Both are having a detrimental effect on ocean biodiversity; with climate change heating ocean temperatures and bleaching coral reefs, to plastic damaging habitats and causing fatalities among marine species.
“The compounding impact of both crises just exacerbates the problem. It’s not a case of debating which issue is most important, it’s recognising that the two crises are interconnected and require joint solutions.”
Professor Koldewey added: “The biggest shift will be moving away from wasteful single-use plastic and from a linear to circular economy that reduces the demand for damaging fossil fuels.”
Helen Ford, from Bangor University, who led the study, said: “I have seen how even the most remote coral reefs are experiencing widespread coral death through global warming-caused mass bleaching. Plastic pollution is yet another threat to these stressed ecosystems.
“Our study shows that changes are already occurring from both plastic pollution and climate change that are affecting marine organisms across marine ecosystems and food webs, from the smallest plankton to the largest whale.”
ZSL is urging world governments and policy makers to put nature at the heart of all decision making in order to jointly tackle the combined global threats of climate change and biodiversity loss.
Researchers found that one tiny Arctic village’s unfiltered sewage produces as much microplastic as the treated waste of more than a million people.
Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago chilling halfway between the Nordic country and the North Pole, is known as much for its rugged beauty as its remoteness. From the village of Longyearbyen, visitors and roughly 2,400 residents can appreciate the stark terrain around the fjord known as Adventfjorden.
But the beauty of this Arctic inlet conceals messier, microscopic secrets.
“People see this nice, clean, white landscape,” said Claudia Halsband, a marine ecologist in Tromso, Norway, “but that’s only part of the story.”
The fjord has a sizable problem with subtle trash — namely microfibers, a squiggly subset of microplastics that slough off synthetic fabrics. Microfibers are turning up everywhere, and among researchers, there’s growing recognition that sewage is helping to spread them, said Peter S. Ross, an ocean pollution scientist who has studied the plastic fouling the Arctic. While the precise impact of microfibers building up in ecosystems remains a topic of debate, tiny Longyearbyen expels an extraordinary amount of them in its sewage: A new study shows that the village of thousands emits roughly as many as all the microplastics emitted by a wastewater treatment plant near Vancouver that serves around 1.3 million people.
The findings, published this summer in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science, highlight the hidden impacts that Arctic communities can have on surrounding waters, as well as the major microfiber emissions that can be produced by even small populations through untreated sewage.
Adventfjorden’s microfibers arrive through a submerged pipe that juts into the fjord like an arm bent at the elbow. It spits out the community’s untreated sewage — urine and feces, plus mush pushed down kitchen sinks and suds from showers and washing machines. Around the world, small or isolated communities wrangle sewage in numerous ways, from corralling it in septic tanks to relying on composting latrines. In Longyearbyen, waste mingles in a single pumping station no bigger than an outhouse before squelching to the fjord through tubes winding atop the frozen earth.
“People think, Out of sight, out of mind; the ocean will take care of it, but this stuff piles up,” Dr. Halsband said.
Microscopes helped researchers make sense of the tiny trash they’d scooped from the pumping station, and estimate how many of the microfibers, shown here, might be spilling into the fjord.Maria Jensen
Curious about trash that isn’t immediately visible to the naked eye, Dr. Halsband and four collaborators sampled the wastewater for microfibers over one week each in June and September 2017, then modeled how the tiny bits might float around the fjord.
“It wasn’t as smelly as we were afraid it would be, but there were floaters,” said Dorte Herzke, a chemist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research and the lead author of the paper.
Back in the lab, researchers filtered and sorted the samples. Lacking equipment that could identify fibers as synthetic or organic, the team discarded anything clear or white that might be cellulose. Still, scores of pieces remained, including dark colors likely from outdoor gear — especially in the September samples, collected “when the hunters start to emerge” and bundle up, Dr. Herzke said. (Previous research found that outerwear such as synthetic fleece tends to shed microfibers in washing machines.)
From these counts, the researchers estimated that the community flushes at least 18 billion microfibers into the fjord each year — roughly 7.5 million per person.
To start puzzling out what happens to the bits in Adventfjorden, the team modeled where the microfibers could accumulate and which species might encounter them. The researchers calculated that the lightest microfibers would stay suspended near the surface and leave the fjord within days, dispersing in roomier waters. Heavier ones would sink to the bottom or cluster near the sewage pipe or inner shore, places that are habitats for plankton, bivalves and bloody-red worms.
Deonie and Steve Allen, married microplastics researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, praised the paper’s model and said in an email that its “really local and timely field data and sampling” bolster its results. But they said it would benefit from chemical analysis, too, a sentiment echoed by Sonja Ehlers, a microplastics researcher at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany. Ms. Ehlers said she would also like to see the team document how local creatures are interacting with the microfibers.
Dr. Halsband suspects they might be consuming the castoffs. “We know they don’t discriminate against plastic,” she said, adding that the team is also keen to learn whether fibers can snarl planktons’ appendages and interfere with their drifting.
Dorte Herzke, documenting walruses with Longyearbyen in background.Louise Kiel Jensen
The researchers returned to the fjord this past summer, collecting samples to check the model’s predictions. Those samples are in a freezer, and will be subjected to a chemical analysis.
The scientists hope their work will prompt Arctic communities to mull new ways to manage sewage and the trash that hitchhikes through it.
“Norway has a lot of fjords,” Dr. Herzke said, and Adventfjorden surely isn’t the only one flecked with feces and tiny pieces of trash. That makes it a useful case study. “Once we understand this one,” Dr. Herzke added, “we can understand others.”
Where thorough sewage treatment isn’t feasible, Dr. Halsband said, communities could consider basic filtration, promote wool alternatives to synthetics and eke out more wears between washes.
As for Longyearbyen, the researchers said it will soon introduce filtration to capture large debris. That may intercept some smaller bits, too — maybe even downright teeny ones.
As the people of Toronto flocked to the Lake Ontario waterfront to swim, paddle and generally escape pandemic isolation, Chelsea Rochman’s students at the University of Toronto were throwing plastic bottles with GPS trackers into the water.
The research team‘s goal is to track trash that ends up in the lake, to figure out where it accumulates in the water and where it’s coming from in the first place.
Using information from the tracking bottles, they chose spots to put in Seabins — stationary cleaning machines that suck in water all day and trap any garbage and debris — at marinas along the waterfront. They are emptied daily, and the debris collected in them is examined to ferret out what kinds of trash is getting into the lake.
Chelsea Rochman, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, and her team have been analyzing plastic waste being collected by Seabins placed in the Toronto harbour. (Inayat Singh/CBC)
The waste includes well-known single-use culprits like takeout containers and clear plastic packaging, but they also include something that gets less attention: pre-production pellets, produced by the plastics industry.
“They’re the tiny little pellets that are later melted down into plastic and different plastic products,” Rochman said.
“So we can trace them back to industry, they have a very distinct look. And then we are now working with industry to try to make sure that they capture them at the source so they don’t come down into the lake.”
An estimated 10,000 tons of plastic waste are getting into the Great Lakes every year, threatening one of the largest reservoirs of freshwater on the planet that supports nearly 50 million people in Canada and the U.S. A 2021 study on seven fish species in Lake Ontario and Lake Superior found “the highest concentration of microplastics and other anthropogenic microparticles ever reported in bony fish.”
While the plastics industry says it’s working on the problem through industry-led initiatives, advocates say there’s a lack of government regulations to address this kind of pollution.
Industry initiative to clean up plastic
Last year, Rochman’s Tagging Trash team collected about 85,000 pieces of microplastics (smaller than 5 millimetres), along with larger pieces of plastic in the Toronto harbour. About 13 per cent of the microplastics they were capturing were pre-production pellets, which can fly off transport vehicles or facilities and end up in the water.
Rochman has taken her findings to industry groups and companies.
“We are now working with industry to try to make sure that they capture them at the source so they don’t come down into the lake,” she said.
The research program is part of the larger Great Lakes Plastics Cleanup, supported by various government agencies and private organizations. There are now Seabins installed at marinas across the Great Lakes region to help tackle the plastics problem.
A Seabin placed in the water in the Toronto harbour that’s sucking in waste. (Inayat Singh/CBC)
The Chemistry Industry Association of Canada represents about 75 plastics companies. Last year, it signed onto Operation Clean Sweep, a global program to prevent plastic materials from industrial operations ending up in lakes and rivers.
“We’re working with our members to make sure they’re putting in place the leading technology, policies and practices and training of their own staff to ensure that these plastic pellets don’t end up in the environment,” said Elana Mantagaris, the vice-president of the plastics division at the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada.
“And if there is a spill because sometimes accidents do happen and we need to acknowledge that we have the appropriate processes to clean up those spills again, preventing the pellets from ending up in the environment.”
The program starts with an assessment at their members’ facilities, Mantagaris said, to pinpoint where plastics might be leaking or falling out. After that, the facilities would be required to bring in measures or equipment to capture that plastic.
For example, Mantagaris said one common spot for plastic pellets to fall out is during transport on trucks or trains, when they are loading their cargo into a facility. Screens can be placed on the rail tracks to catch the pellets spilling out and preventing them from ending up in the environment.
Calls for government intervention
Yannick Beaudoin, the director of innovation at the David Suzuki Foundation in Toronto, says it’s time to be acting more seriously on the plastics problem.
Yannick Beaudoin of the David Suzuki Foundation says government intervention is required to address plastic pollution. (David Suzuki Foundation)
“Do we know enough? Yes, we know enough. Things are bad,” he said. “And the other part of it is there’s no actual excuse for doing this, right?
“When it comes to things like pre-production plastic pellets, we know where it comes from. We know why it happens. And there’s no real excuse for it to happen in the first place. “
Beaudoin says that while industry-led initiatives like Operation Clean Sweep do help, they do not solve the whole problem. Government intervention, along with pressure from consumers is necessary to cut down on these plastics and keep them out of the lake.
Figuring out which government agency or law should be applied can be a challenge. The issue crosses jurisdictional boundaries, with the federal government in charge of protecting transboundary waters as well as regulating chemicals and products that are toxic, Beaudoin said. However, it remains unclear if pre-production pellets are covered.
Provincial governments in theory have even more power over environmental protection, but Beaudoin says enforcement related to pre-production pellets is simply not applied.
Environment and Climate Change Canada referred CBC to its actions on achieving zero plastic waste by 2030. That effort is focused on single-use plastic products and “working with provinces and territories to make producers responsible for the plastic waste that their products generate.”
The Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks did not respond to CBC’s request for comment by deadline.
Across the border in the United States, a bill was introduced this year to address pre-production pellets. The Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act will require the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration to prohibit the discharge of these pellets into waterways from industry and transport sources. The bill is currently making its way through Congress.
“If you had an oil spill somewhere around here, you’d have to call a very specific government hotline and you have to get a process going because an oil spill is something that we deem quite visibly as toxic,” said Beaudoin.
“Well, plastic pellets are oil. They’re just a solid version of it. Why aren’t we reacting in the same way?”
Plastic pellets wash up among driftwood and other objects seen on Baxter Beach along the shores of Lake Huron near Sarnia, Ont. (Synthetic Collective)
Artists and scientists collaborate
A 2020 study by researchers at Western University also found these pre-production pellets on beaches all over the Great Lakes. The study found that the problem was worse in areas with a lots of plastics industry, such as near Sarnia, Ont., and Toronto.
This map from the Western University study on plastic pellets in the Great Lakes shows which beaches had the most pollution. (Patricia L. Corcoran et. al 2020)
A group of artists participated in the study to bring the issue to life at an exhibition in Toronto. Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through is currently ongoing at the University of Toronto Art Museum, with its central focus on the pellets found through the Western study.
Tegan Moore is one of the artists in the exhibition. Her piece used over 7,000 pellets found on just one beach in the study.
The pellets are strewn in a way to emulate a strand line — the line between the land and water on a beach, where debris is deposited. The pellets in her piece represent the actual density of pellets on that beach in a 1×10 metre area.
Artist Tegan Moore collaborate with researchers to help bring to life a Western University study on plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. (CBC)
Moore hopes her art will act as a sort of data visualization that can help people understand the pellet problem more vividly.
“I think that the piece can bring a visibility to this particular type of plastic pollution, which is just not known and it’s really hard to see,” she said.
“You know, next time someone goes to the beach, they might see them along a strand line and understand what they are.”
Tegan Moore’s artwork is titled Permeations of a Dataset, and aims to visualize plastic pellets on a beach on the Great Lakes. (CBC)
That understanding is what researchers like Rochman hope will get more people interested in — and concerned about — the Great Lakes, hopefully leading to more pressure on governments and industry to bring in change.
“I think there’s been a lot more people using the parks and the beaches this year, absolutely, with the pandemic. So hopefully that creates more appreciation,” she said.
“I think there’s a lot of love for the Great Lakes and hopefully that continues. And yes, with climate change and drought and the issues we live in, we’re very lucky to live here. So we should appreciate the resource we have.”
Another piece at the University of Toronto art exhibition, by artist Skye Morét, using plastic material that for the most part cannot be collected by curbside municipal recycling programs and will end up in the landfill. (Toni Hafkenscheid)
The COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating plastic pollution. A shift in waste management practices is thus urgently needed to close the plastic loop, requiring governments, researchers and industries working towards intelligent design and sustainable upcycling.
Plastic pollution is ubiquitous. As of 2015, approximately 6,300 million metric tons (Mt) of plastic waste had been generated globally1, motivating myriad initiatives to reduce plastic consumption. However, the focus on plastic waste reduction has since been overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Traditionally minor sources of plastic pollution — including personal protective equipment (PPE) — have become far more prominent, exacerbating consumption. Moreover, some regulatory measures meant to reduce plastic have been delayed and/or rolled back during the pandemic, stalling or even reversing the longstanding global battle to mitigate plastic pollution.
Approximately 400 Mt of plastic waste was produced globally in 2019 (ref.1). However, the estimated waste volume reached over 530 Mt in the first 7 months of the COVID-19 outbreak (December 2019–June 2020) (ref.2), suggesting plastic waste totals for 2020 would be at least double those of 2019. Part of this increase results from the public demand for disposable face masks and gloves; globally, an estimated ~3.4 billion protective face masks were discarded daily from December 2019 to June 2020 (ref.2). Moreover, the consumption of plastic packaging by takeaway services, e-commerce outlets and express delivery industries increased extensively with social distancing requirements. Takeaway and home delivery services generated additional 1.21 Mt of plastic waste from April to May 2020 during the lockdown in Singapore alone.
A notable portion of this waste does not make it to municipal waste streams. Masks, gloves and other plastics (including hand sanitizer bottles) are found indiscriminately littered and disposed of without precautionary measures. Such inadequate plastic waste management results in an alarming accumulation of plastic in soil and aquatic ecosystems. For example, it is estimated that approximately 1.56 billion face masks (~5.66 Mt of plastic) ended up in the oceans in 2020. Large pieces of plastic waste, (including masks,) can break into microplastics (>100 nm and <5 mm) and nanoplastics (<100 nm)3. The accidental ingestion of these micro-/nano-plastics by marine and freshwater organisms, alongside unexpected accumulation in terrestrial plants and animals, and transport in the atmosphere as “plastic-rain” or “plastic-smog,” raise concerns for the safety of human food, drinking water and breathable air4. Moreover, micro-/nano-plastics can serve as potential vectors for pathogens and toxic contaminants, leading to injury and death, with direct negative effects on biodiversity.
The marked increase in PPE waste has overwhelmed waste management programs globally, as used plastic PPE must be disposed of suitably to prevent cross-contamination. Indeed, potentially contaminated plastics are restricted at recycling centres, meaning incineration and landfilling are being widely prioritized. Such disposal methods are a clear deviation from the goals of plastic circular economy and sustainable development5, and incineration can also lead to serious deteriorations in air quality via long-term emission of volatile toxins (including dioxins and furans) and greenhouse gases6.
Thus, governments must ensure that the plastic waste generated during the COVID-19 pandemic is collected, segregated and disposed of in a coordinated manner. Waste treatment facilities should have real-time information of incoming PPE waste volume, types and hotspots of generation, and potentially contaminated waste should be collected in specifically labelled reusable containers for easy separation and treatment. An integrated mechanical and chemical recycling process is therefore needed for the disposal of plastic PPE in the immediate future7. Hydrocracking, for instance, is a potentially sustainable process8 because of its low carbon emissions and energy consumption, and the ease of controlling related pollutants. More effective use of current waste management technologies should be leveraged with government incentives to efficiently reach the goal of generating zero plastic pollution. Going forward, end-of-life plastic PPE should be designed to be completely degraded or properly upcycled for value-added applications rather than being mismanaged.
Of course, a balance needs to be struck between protecting public health and mitigating environmental damage during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the long-term, though, current plastic waste management schemes alone cannot keep pace with the estimated growth in plastic waste generation, even if capacity is increased. This problem has been magnified by COVID-19, but the pandemic is not the root cause of it – single-use plastics were already pervasive and disposed of improperly. There is a pressing need for an immediate shift towards the plastic circular economy, both during the pandemic, but even more importantly, afterwards. Achieving this goal requires cooperation between consumers, researchers, governments and industries (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: A proposed shift towards a circular plastic economy.
Global plastic pollution has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Sustainable plastic use should be prioritized, with the aim to create a circular plastic economy.
Technological breakthroughs are needed to create a closed-loop plastic society, starting at the design stage and up through disposal and environmental recovery. Biodegradable plastics are a promising future technology; however, full techno-economic and environmental footprint assessments for industrial-scale applications are needed before they are broadly implemented. Industries should provide exhaustive information of the biodegradable plastic stream flow to related researchers and policymakers so that appropriate techno-socio-economic analyses can be conducted to formulate policies. Beyond biodegradable plastics, advanced and efficient catalytic conversion routes for plastic waste upcycling offer opportunities to enhance the profitability from both environmental and resource-recovery viewpoints. These upcycling technologies should be encouraged and implemented by governments in their waste management programs. Renewable energy, such as low- or medium-grade solar thermal power, should be used to upcycle plastic waste to obtain hydrogen fuel and produce clean carbon9. With concerted efforts from industries, and financial and policy support from governments, these novel technologies could be upscaled for commercial applications alongside the push to achieve net-zero emissions in the coming decades.
Closing the loop on plastic might not be a reality just yet. However, heightened consumer awareness, increased industry innovation, expanded government investment and continued research can mitigate plastic burdens on the environment and develop a society guided by a circular economy.
References
1.
Geyer, R., Jambeck, J. R. & Law, K. S. Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made. Sci. Adv.3, e1700782 (2017).
Davidson, M. G., Furlong, R. A. & McManus, M. C. Developments in the life cycle assessment of chemical recycling of plastic waste–a review. J. Clean. Prod.293, 126163 (2021).
X.Y. and Y.S.O. were supported through a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (no. 2021R1A2C2011734), and were partly supported by the OJEong Resilience Institute (OJERI) Research Grant from the OJERI, Korea University, Republic of Korea. B.S. was supported by the Lancaster Environment Centre Project.
Author information
Affiliations
Korea Biochar Research Center, APRU Sustainable Waste Management Program & Division of Environmental Science and Ecological Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Korea
Xiangzhou Yuan & Yong Sik Ok
Department of Chemical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Xiaonan Wang
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
Xiaonan Wang
Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Binoy Sarkar
Sustainable Minerals Institute, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Yong Sik Ok
Department of Soil and Groundwater Management, University of Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany
Yuan, X., Wang, X., Sarkar, B. et al. The COVID-19 pandemic necessitates a shift to a plastic circular economy. Nat Rev Earth Environ (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-021-00223-2
A Democratic proposal to help finance the party’s $3.5 trillion spending bill by taxing single-use plastics is generating sharp pushback from members of the industry, who argue it would produce more waste and hurt average Americans.
The Senate Finance Committee is weighing the idea of a tax on the sale of virgin plastic resin — the base materials used to make single-use plastics — as one potential way to pay for the mammoth spending bill, according to a document released earlier this month.
But the proposal has garnered fierce opposition from the plastics division of the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a trade group representing 28 companies including oil giants such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell as well as major chemical manufacturers such as DuPont and Dow Chemical.
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The group argues that such a levy would amount to some $40 billion in additional taxes and “punish Americans” who depend on plastics in electric vehicles, home insulation, electronics and packaging, while funding unrelated government programs and fueling inflation.
“Plastic goes into a variety of applications, not just food packaging,” Joshua Baca, vice president of the ACC’s plastics division, told The Hill. “At the end of the day, this would result in a regressive tax that would largely impact those who can least afford it.”
Baca argued that implementation of the measure would lead to “incentivizing the use of other materials — whether that’s paper, glass, aluminum — all of which have a higher [carbon] footprint than plastics.”
Manufacturing such alternatives produces 2.7 times more greenhouse emissions than their plastic counterparts and consumes twice as much energy, Baca contended.
If all plastic bottles were replaced by glass ones, the power necessary to manufacture them would be the equivalent to running 22 large coal fired power plants, he said, arguing that such a shift would negatively impact the climate and “also be detrimental to our economy.”
A plastic resin tax is not the only funding option under consideration for the $3.5 trillion spending bill. The Senate Finance Committee is also discussing taxes on stock buybacks and on corporations whose CEO pay exceeds the pay of their average workers, as well as energy-tax proposals.
“Plastic pollution chokes our oceans, hastens climate change, and threatens people’s well-being,” Whitehouse said last month. “On its own, the plastics industry has done far too little to address the damage its products cause, so this bill gives the market a stronger incentive toward less plastic waste and more recycled plastic.”
This “excise tax” — a duty imposed on a specific good — would apply to virgin resin, according to Whitehouse’s bill. Manufacturers, producers and importers of the resin would pay $0.10 per pound in 2022, which would gradually rise to $0.20 per pound in 2024.
The fees generated by this process would go toward a Plastic Waste Reduction Fund, which would serve to improve recycling activities.
The ACC immediately opposed the REDUCE Act in August, arguing that policymakers should instead adopt comprehensive policies that could lead to a “circular economy” — an economy in which production and consumption focuses on extending the lifecycle of products and minimizing waste, as defined by the European Union.
Some policies the ACC has backed include requiring plastic packaging to contain 30 percent recycled plastic by 2030, developing a national recycling standard for plastics and studying the impact of greenhouse gases from materials, among other proposals.
Baca stressed the importance of establishing a better set of recycling standards for communities across the country, arguing that suitable regulations for recycling technologies would ensure “that private sector investment continues to happen at a commercial scale.”
“When you tie all of those things together, that is how you get a circular system,” Baca said.
The need to transition domestic recycling programs to a “circular economy” was the topic of discussion at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on Wednesday.
Carper called upon companies to “step up and take greater responsibility for reducing, reusing and recycling their products,” adding that the government should play a role in ensuring that industry can succeed in this effort.
In response to the hearing, Baca said that the ACC submitted statements expressing the group’s viewpoints, including measures it would support.
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Asked how the group’s members are working to make hard plastics easier to recycle, Baca explained that traditional recycling tools have their limitations and more advanced systems must be developed to break down plastics into their basic building blocks.
Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical has invested in a $150 million plastics facility that will come online soon, he said, adding that ExxonMobil has partnered with Oregon-based Agilyx to launch a joint plastic recycling venture.
Baca also said that due to supply chain issues, plastic manufacturers cannot all overhaul their plants to use solely recycled or biobased feedstock. To use more recycled plastic, companies need to either have the innovative technologies to break down hard-to-recycle materials or the means to collect feedstock, he said.
To date, Baca said, the plastics industry has invested almost $7 billion in promoting advanced recycling technologies, which he called “a step in the right direction,” as many companies begin to launch these technologies on a commercial scale.
“Brands have made a commitment to use more recycled plastics,” Baca said. “If we don’t produce and make that material we won’t be in business. This is not only good for our company, bottom line, but it’s good for the environment.”
Consumers in some Northern Virginia communities will have to pay for plastic bags starting next year.
Fairfax County became the first Virginia locality in the Chesapeake Bay watershed to pass a five-cent fee on the use of plastic retail bags when the measure was approved by its Board of Supervisors in mid-September. Alexandria and Arlington followed suit later the same week, passing their own versions of the measure.
Trash piles up in a portion of Little Hunting Creek, a tributary of the Potomac River, just downstream from the Janna Lee Avenue bridge in Alexandria, VA.
The purpose of the fee, sometimes called a tax, is to discourage use of disposable plastic bags, which are among the most common items found as litter in local waterways.
Plastic bags “damage aquatic ecosystems and the micro-particles of plastics created when they break down make their way into our water sources,” Fairfax County Board Supervisor James Walkinshaw wrote in a statement.
“Plastic bag taxes are proven in jurisdictions across the nation,” he said. “This measure will reduce plastic pollution, and the modest funds collected will be reinvested into litter prevention and to providing reusable bags for low-income community members.”
Plastic bags and bottles are among the most common forms of plastic that wash into waterways. Plastics break down into microscopic pieces that carry toxins and are found in streams, rivers, oceans and the Chesapeake Bay. (Donna Morelli)
The City of Roanoke, which is not within Virginia’s portion of the Chesapeake watershed, was the first locality in the state to pass a plastic bag fee. The Virginia General Assembly, which must give cities and counties permission to pass such local measures, approved legislation in 2020 allowing them to adopt plastic bag ordinances.
The District of Columbia and several localities in Maryland already charge five-cent fees on plastic bags. Maryland’s General Assembly nearly passed a statewide plastic bag ban in 2020 and 2021. Studies have shown a correlation between such fees and bans on certain disposable products and reduced plastic waste in nearby rivers.
Fairfax County’s five-cent fee on plastic bags will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2022.
New research compared a variety of synthetic ropes commonly used in the maritime industry. Credit: University of Plymouth
The hauling of rope on maritime vessels could result in billions of microplastic fragments entering the ocean every year, according to new research.
The study, by the University of Plymouth’s International Marine Litter Research Unit, is the first to explore the potential for rope to become a source of microplastic pollution in the marine environment.
It compared a variety of synthetic ropes commonly used in the maritime industry—but differing in age, wear surface and material—to assess the quantity and characterizes of microplastics produced while they were in use.
This was achieved by simulating, in both laboratory and field experiments, the rope hauling activity which is typically performed on board maritime vessels such as fishing boats.
The results show that new and one-year old ropes can release around 20 microplastic fragments into the ocean for every meter hauled.
However, as the rope gets older it can release significantly more fragments—two-year-old ropes shed on average around 720 fragments per meter, while 10-year-old rope releases more than 760 fragments per meter.
Writing in Science of the Total Environment, researchers say that in fishing activities the rope length deployed during each haul could be up to 220m depending on the type of vessel and the depth of the ocean.
The research simulated the rope hauling activity which is typically performed on board maritime vessels. Credit: University of Plymouth
However, based on a modest 50m of rope being hauled from a boat, they estimate that each time new rope is hauled it could release between 700 and 2000 microplastic pieces. Used rope could release anywhere up to 40,000 fragments.
With more than 4,500 active fishing vessels in the UK, their estimates suggest this could result in anything between 326 million to 17 billion microplastic pieces entering the ocean annually from the UK fleet alone.
Research Fellow Dr. Imogen Napper, who led the study, said: “These estimates were calculated after hauling a 2.5kg weight. However, most maritime activities would be hauling much heavier loads, creating more friction and potentially more fragments. It highlights the pressing need for standards on rope maintenance, replacement and recycling in the maritime industry. However, it also shows the importance of continued innovation in synthetic rope design with the specific aim to reduce microplastic emissions.”
The University of Plymouth was the first to highlight the global problem of marine microplastics, earning the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in 2019.
Previous research, in conjunction with the Fishing for Litter initiative, has shown that commercial fishers are acutely aware of the potential for marine litter to cause lasting damage to their catches and the wider industry.
The University is also part of an ongoing project working to develop biodegradable fishing gear that can be used by both small and large boats across the industry.
Professor Richard Thompson OBE FRS, Head of the International Marine Litter Research Unit, said: “For centuries, most everyday items including rope and netting used in the maritime industry was produced using natural resources. However, the large-scale increase in plastic production since the 1950s has resulted in plastics progressively replacing their natural counterparts. The durability of plastic has however resulted in a major environmental challenge once items reach the end of their lifetime or, as in this study, when they shed microplastics. Greater appreciation of the issues within wider society, are starting to make a difference. However, this study emphasizes a previously unquantified yet substantive source of microplastics and reinforces the level of collaboration required to achieve lasting and positive change.”
More information:
Imogen Ellen Napper et al, Potential microplastic release from the maritime industry: Abrasion of rope, Science of The Total Environment (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.150155
Citation:
Maritime rope could be adding billions of microplastics to the ocean every year (2021, September 22)
retrieved 22 September 2021
from https://phys.org/news/2021-09-maritime-rope-adding-billions-microplastics.html
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State regulators are cracking down on where property owners may install artificial turf near coastal waterways.
During the meeting of the Coastal Resources Commission Wednesday, Sept. 15, Robb Mairs, minor permits coordinator with the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management’s Wilmington office, said the use of artificial turf within the state’s 75-foot coastal shorelines area of environmental concern, or AEC, and associated 30-foot buffer “suddenly emerged” this year.
The seemingly new trend has raised concerns about certain materials used to install artificial grass, the different types of material used to make artificial turf, whether those materials are pervious or not, and how their proximity to coastal waters may affect water quality.
Coastal Resources Commission rules restrict development within the 30-foot buffer to water uses, including docks, piers, boat ramps, bulkheads and accessways. There are some exceptions to the rules, such as pile-supported signs, elevated, slatted wooden boardwalks, crab shedders, decks and grading, excavation, and landscaping as long as it excludes wetland fill — unless required by permit in a shoreline-stabilization project.
However, the state does not have standards for artificial turf being installed within that buffer, Mairs explained.
Coastal AECs include wetlands, estuarine waters, public trust areas and estuarine and public trust shorelines.
The 30-foot buffer within those AECs is considered by state coastal officials to be particularly crucial in protecting water quality.
Division of Coastal Management officials this past May first caught wind of artificial turf being installed within the 75-foot AEC in Wrightsville Beach, according to Christy Simmons, division spokesperson.
“That case was resolved through an enforcement action and the shoreline buffer was restored,” Simmons said in an email.
Since then, the division has been reviewing cases in Corolla in Currituck County, Topsail Beach in Pender County and Wrightsville Beach in New Hanover County, she said. In some of those cases, artificial turf will have to be removed, at least from within the 30-foot shoreline buffer.
“In the limited enforcement cases we’ve had so far, we’ve only required removal of the artificial turf and have not assessed any civil penalties,” Simmons said.
As division permit officers are handling these cases, they’re fielding a growing interest from property owners and landscapers asking about placing artificial turf within the coastal shoreline AEC.
Part of the debate about regulating artificial turf within the AEC goes to the question whether fake grass and the materials used to install it are impervious.
Coastal Resources Commissioner Neal Andrew said at the commission’s Sept. 15 meeting that he’d seen some of the artificial turf that has been installed in Wrightsville Beach.
“It appears water does drain through this material and therefore appears to act as a pervious surface,” he said. “I personally don’t see an issue with it being outside that 30-foot range.”
Division Director Braxton Davis said it had yet to be determined whether artificial turf is pervious and that any such determination may have to be concluded on a case-by-case basis.
Mairs said the problem is that some components of artificial turf appear to be inconsistent with standards set by the North Carolina Division of Water Resources and state Energy, Mineral and Land Resources, or DEMLR, state stormwater section.
DEMLR staff say they would have to decide case-by-case whether artificial turf is pervious.
Any such determination would not preclude DEMLR’s regulations that require vegetated setbacks from surface waters in coastal stormwater permits. The rules mandate that the area within the buffer remain vegetated unless one or more exceptions in the rules have been met.
Artificial turf is not an exception.
Buffer rules in the Tar-Pamlico and Neuse rivers do not include artificial turf in their table of uses.
Division of Water Resources officials advised that artificial turf appears to contradict the intent of the rules to preserve the buffer as a function for removing nutrients.
Water resources officials have expressed concerns about the potential of small plastic fibers, and rubber or silica beads sometimes mixed into soil under the turf during installation getting into nearby waters and potentially violating state water quality standards.
Larry Baldwin, vice chair for the Coastal Resources Commission, said that if artificial turf is installed for the purpose of stormwater infiltration, design could make a difference, especially if it were to cut down on potential nutrient runoff if turf is used replace fertilized grass.
“I’m kind of torn on this in terms of what’s better for water quality,” he said.
Commissioners voted 10-1, with Baldwin dissenting, to prohibit the installation of artificial turf within the 30-foot buffer.
“I think if we’re all concerned about water quality I’m going to make it as simple for staff as possible and protect the last line of defense for our waters,” said commission Chair Renee Cahoon.
Commissioner Craig Bromby said the commission should look further into the matter.
“I think we can maintain the status quo and endorse (the division’s) interpretation, but I think this needs looking at,” he said.
An alarming new study finds that infant feces contain 10 times more polyethylene terephthalate (aka polyester) than an adult’s.
Whenever a plastic bag or bottle degrades, it breaks into ever smaller pieces that work their way into nooks in the environment. When you wash synthetic fabrics, tiny plastic fibers break loose and flow out to sea. When you drive, plastic bits fly off your tires and brakes. That’s why literally everywhere scientists look, they’re finding microplastics—specks of synthetic material that measure less than 5 millimeters long. They’re on the most remote mountaintops and in the deepest oceans. They’re blowing vast distances in the wind to sully once pristine regions like the Arctic. In 11 protected areas in the western US, the equivalent of 120 million ground-up plastic bottles are falling out of the sky each year.
And now, microplastics are coming out of babies. In a pilot study published today, scientists describe sifting through infants’ dirty diapers and finding an average of 36,000 nanograms of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) per gram of feces, 10 times the amount they found in adult feces. They even found it in newborns’ first feces. PET is an extremely common polymer that’s known as polyester when it’s used in clothing, and it is also used to make plastic bottles. The finding comes a year after another team of researchers calculated that preparing hot formula in plastic bottles severely erodes the material, which could dose babies with several million microplastic particles a day, and perhaps nearly a billion a year.
Although adults are bigger, scientists think that in some ways infants have more exposure. In addition to drinking from bottles, babies could be ingesting microplastics in a dizzying number of ways. They have a habit of putting everything in their mouths—plastic toys of all kinds, but they’ll also chew on fabrics. (Microplastics that shed from synthetic textiles are known more specifically as microfibers, but they’re plastic all the same.) Babies’ foods are wrapped in single-use plastics. Children drink from plastic sippy cups and eat off plastic plates. The carpets they crawl on are often made of polyester. Even hardwood floors are coated in polymers that shed microplastics. Any of this could generate tiny particles that children breathe or swallow.
Indoor dust is also emerging as a major route of microplastic exposure, especially for infants. (In general, indoor air is absolutely lousy with them; each year you could be inhaling tens of thousands of particles.) Severalstudies of indoor spaces have shown that each day in a typical household, 10,000 microfibers might land on a single square meter of floor, having flown off of clothing, couches, and bed sheets. Infants spend a significant amount of their time crawling through the stuff, agitating the settled fibers and kicking them up into the air.
“Unfortunately, with the modern lifestyle, babies are exposed to so many different things for which we don’t know what kind of effect they can have later in their life,” says Kurunthachalam Kannan, an environmental health scientist at New York University School of Medicine and coauthor of the new paper, which appears in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters.
The researchers did their tally by collecting dirty diapers from six 1-year-olds and running the feces through a filter to collect the microplastics. They did the same with three samples of meconium—a newborn’s first feces—and stool samples from 10 adults. In addition to analyzing the samples for PET, they also looked for polycarbonate plastic, which is used as a lightweight alternative to glass, for instance in eyeglass lenses. To make sure that they only counted the microplastics that came from the infants’ guts, and not from their diapers, they ruled out the plastic that the diapers were made of: polypropylene, a polymer that’s distinct from polycarbonate and PET.
All told, PET concentrations were 10 times higher in infants than in adults, while polycarbonate levels were more even between the two groups. The researchers found smaller amounts of both polymers in the meconium, suggesting that babies are born with plastics already in their systems. This echoes previous studies that have found microplastics in human placentas and meconium.
What this all means for human health—and, more urgently, for infant health—scientists are now racing to find out. Different varieties of plastic can contain any of at least 10,000 different chemicals, a quarter of which are of concern for people, according to a recent study from researchers at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. These additives serve all kinds of plastic-making purposes, like providing flexibility, extra strength, or protection from UV bombardment, which degrades the material. Microplastics may contain heavy metals like lead, but they also tend to accumulate heavy metals and other pollutants as they tumble through the environment. They also readily grow a microbial community of viruses, bacteria, and fungi, many of which are human pathogens.
Of particular concern are a class of chemicals called endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, which disrupt hormones and have been connected to reproductive, neurological, and metabolic problems, for instance increased obesity. The infamous plastic ingredient bisphenol A, or BPA, is one such EDC that has been linked to various cancers.
“We should be concerned because the EDCs in microplastics have been shown to be linked with several adverse outcomes in human and animal studies,” says Jodi Flaws, a reproductive toxicologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who led a 2020 study from the Endocrine Society on plastics. (She wasn’t involved in this new research.) “Some of the microplastics contain chemicals that can interfere with the normal function of the endocrine system.”
Infants are especially vulnerable to EDCs, since the development of their bodies depends on a healthy endocrine system. “I strongly believe that these chemicals do affect early life stages,” says Kannan. “That’s a vulnerable period.”
This new research adds to a growing body of evidence that babies are highly exposed to microplastic. “This is a very interesting paper with some very worrying numbers,” says University of Strathclyde microplastic researcher Deonie Allen, who wasn’t involved in the study. “We need to look at everything a child is exposed to, not just their bottles and toys.”
Since infants are passing microplastics in their feces, that means the gut could be absorbing some of the particles, like it would absorb nutrients from food. This is known as translocation: Particularly small particles might pass through the gut wall and end up in other organs, including the brain. Researchers have actually demonstrated this in carp by feeding them plastic particles, which translocated through the gut and worked their way to the head, where they caused brain damage that manifested as behavioral problems: Compared to control fish, the individuals with plastic particles in their brains were less active and ate more slowly.
But that was done with very high concentrations of particles, and in an entirely different species. While scientists know that EDCs are bad news, they don’t yet know what level of microplastic exposure it would take to cause problems in the human body. “We need many more studies to confirm the doses and types of chemicals in microplastics that lead to adverse outcomes,” says Flaws.
In the meantime, microplastics researchers say you can limit children’s contact with particles. Do not prepare infant formula with hot water in a plastic bottle—use a glass bottle and transfer it over to the plastic one once the liquid reaches room temperature. Vacuum and sweep to keep floors clear of microfibers. Avoid plastic wrappers and containers when possible. Microplastics have contaminated every aspect of our lives, so while you’ll never get rid of them, you can at least reduce your family’s exposure.
More microplastics in babies’ faeces than in adults’ – study
Researchers say children’s mouthing behaviour and products such as bottles may be to blame
Sofia Quaglia
Last modified on Wed 22 Sep 2021 11.12 EDT
Infants have more microplastics in their faeces than adults do, a study has found.
Microplastics are plastic particles smaller than 5mm in size that have been released into the environment from the breakage of bigger plastic objects. They are a threat to the environment because they do not easily biodegrade, and recent research has found them in dust, food, fruit, bottled water and, as a result, animal and human faeces.
Human exposure to microplastics is a possible health concern, but little is known about its extent. In a small study, researchers from New York University School of Medicine discovered that infants have 10-20 times higher microplastic concentrations in their stool than adults, specifically when it comes to PET (polyethylene terephthalate) microplastics. These are mainly used in the production of textile fibres, water bottles and mobile phone cases, for example.
“Human exposure to microplastics is a health concern,” said Kurunthachalam Kannan, a professor in the paediatrics department at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the lead researcher on the study. “We need to make efforts to reduce exposure in children. Children’s products should be made free of plastics.”
It has been estimated that the averageperson can ingest up to 5 grams of microplastic a week. Some of the microplastics pass seamlessly through the digestive system and are expelled in faeces, some microplastics are accumulated within bodily organs, and recent research has shown that some pieces cross cell membranes and enter the bloodstream. Other studies have shown generational transmission of microplastics from pregnant mothers to their baby’s placenta.
Not much is known about how microplastics affect and possibly damage the human body, but some tests on laboratory animals have shown inflammation, cell shutdown and metabolic issues.
By analysing the faeces of six infants and 10 adults, and three newborns’ first stool, through a method called mass spectrometry, Kannan and his team looked into human exposure to two common microplastics – PET and polycarbonate (PC). Every sample had at least one type of microplastic in it.
The level of PC microplastics were roughly the same in adults and infants, but infants had 10-20 times higher levels of PET microplastics.
“We were surprised to find higher levels in infants than adults, but later tried to understand various sources of exposure in infants,” Kannan said. “We found that infants’ mouthing behaviour, such as crawling on carpets and chewing on textiles, as well as various products used for children including teethers, plastic toys, feeding bottles, utensils such as spoons … can all contribute to such exposure.”
These findings are in line with those of other studies, albeit few, that have looked into microplastic contamination in human stools, said Scott Coffin, a research scientist at the California State Water Resources Control Board who was not involved in the research. If anything, these results suggest that current estimates of exposure to microplastics are likely under-representative, Coffin said, quoting the study he believes to be the most rigorous assessment to date, conducted by researchers at the Wageningen University and Research.
“A component that is not accounted for in this study is the accumulation of microplastics into organs following exposure,” said Coffin. Excretion of all microplastics ingested is unlikely in humans, Coffin said, so the levels overall might be even higher. This, among many other details, is still to be ironed out in future studies.
For example, there is a possibility of contamination during the experiment when dealing with faeces and microplastics (contamination from diapers, for example, or from the scientific equipment itself). Plus, the analytical method used to calculate the mass of microplastics in faeces is relatively uncommon, according to Coffin, and has not yet to his knowledge undergone robust validation.
Overall, the exposure to and hazards of microplastics to humans are poorly understood, but Coffin said the study provided much-needed preliminary data.
